No stereotype is possible without elements of truth. Some received clichés, however, are more reliable than others. Take Ireland and Germany for example; where journalists shed the guise of civility recently to validate long-standing national tropes, fake Irish piety and residual German fascism.

Ireland’s political and “cultural” magazine, Village, featured a cover with President Trump as a target, with text which argued that Catholic theology justified assassination. Ironically, this argument comes from an islet that still genuflects to the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Over in Germany, Der Spiegel ran a cover showing Trump beheading a bloody Statue of Liberty, suggesting that Trump might kill an infidel or apostate in the Islamic manner.

Tasteless doesn’t begin to describe this variety of fake journalism so much as it reveals cultural truths about the countries of origin, if not validating a host of euro-trash stereotypes.

Culture and politics in Ireland has long been a function of bullets, bombs, alcohol, religious fascism, clerical, pedophilia, and, more recently, anti-Semitism wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh.

Indeed, modern Irish history reads like Dante: centuries of religious mayhem, followed by more recent collaboration with European fascists, collusion with Mideast and North African terrorists, and lately a national clerical scandal involving homosexual pedophiles that makes the Boston Catholic archdiocese look like a boy scout retreat.

If you can pardon the analogy, Dublin and the Vatican now have a leg up on Boston. The former Irish Catholic Archbishop of Boston, you may recall, is still closeted in the Vatican to avoid American prosecutors. When Pope Francis was asked about the arrogant gay clique in the Roman Curia itself, he responded: “Who am I to judge?” This is the same Mario Bergoglio who allowed Fatah terrorists to open an official embassy to the Vatican, in the middle of Europe.

The Village exhumed Saint Thomas Aquinas to justify the charge that Trump is a tyrant. Using Thomism to argue for assassination is a little like blessing a rosary with toilet water. The Irish call their cultural magazine, “Village.” Indeed, small minds in a tight moral space, lest you missed the point.

Ireland was once thought to be the land of saints and scholars, the most Catholic country in Europe. Alas, today Ireland is rated the most anti-Semitic country in Europe, a distinction once held by Germans.

If the subject is gratuitous mayhem or terror, Catholic Ireland and global Islam share the same bloody pedigree.

Not to be outdone by the Irish, Germany now equates emerging American policy with Islamism and terrorists, evoking flashbacks to the Goebbels and Hitler era where Berlin slander and calumny was used to demonize, then exterminate Jews. No small wonder then that a German publisher just released a 21st Century edition of Mein Kampf as if 20th Century Europe didn’t get enough Hitler.

Under Angela Merkel, Germany is more Goebbels than Goethe. Apparently, you can ban the National Socialist party in Berlin whilst not exorcising the Nazi weevil from the German psyche.

Take Merkel’s “open borders” policy and subsequent Muslim migrant blitz. No head of state in the EU has done more for terror, fear, appeasement, jihad, Islamic religious fascism, and continental instability than the German chancellor.

If the EU is going the way of the Holy Roman Empire, no single individual is more culpable than “Angela.” Indeed, if common sense security is at risk in Europe, the angel of death rides on Merkel’s broom.

And if the subject is fascism, Merkel and Berlin get high marks again for cultural consistency. In two world wars, Germany sponsored Arab and Muslim fascists in Palestine and more recently in a crumbling Yugoslavia. Muslim Bosnia and Muslim Kosovo now provide more fighters to the Islamic State than any other European country. Historical German secular fascism and now Islamic religious fascism are mutts from the same litter.

Merkel is not without consequential EU collaborators. European Council president Donald Tusk calls the new American administration a “threat” after only two weeks in office. French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, channeling the Vichy meme of yore, says that France is going to have to “learn to live with (Islamic) terrorism.”

A better question might be; who wants to live in a European Union that might evolve into an Islamic caliphate?

Valls may be prescient nevertheless. Angela Merkel is probably overcompensating for Hitler, ignoring the religious fascism of Persians, Arabs, and Islam at large. Taking cues from Berlin, the greater danger now is arrogance, spite, and panic at the EU Council.

Most of the loose talk about Nazis and fascists is an attempt to make a hysterical European left appear to be victims. Social democrats in today’s Europe are linear descendants of totalitarian Communists and fascist National Socialists. The bottom line in Brussels, unfortunately, is still Big Brother and the nanny state.

Since WW II, the usual coercion and violence on the left has been ameliorated by sugar teat dependency. As social democracies run out of other people’s money, and gullible voters, socialist mayhem should resume in earnest.

Meanwhile, religious reinforcements arrive daily from the Ummah. Brussels, led by Berlin, makes the continental jihad possible. Kulturkampf in Germany is now schadenfreude for the remnants of civilization in the West.

Unfortunately, poetic justice does hold a candle to just war.

Indeed, the EU is more hospitable to Muslim migrants than is the Arab League or the Organization of Islamic States. Islam is happy, if not eager, to export religious dogma and Islamic politics to a submissive West. Both terror and callous indifference to Islamic migrants/ refugees makes islamophobia possible.

Muslim state failure to aid Islam’s victims gives life to every stereotype about jihad and the abject moral inferiority of global Islamic politics.

Generalizations about European culture, Irish and German especially, are probably as valid as any contemporary stereotypes about Muslims. Difficult as it is to imagine the shamrock and the swastika as allies, behavior and cultural beggary make such wingmen possible.

The European Union began as a promising economic condominium. Over time, EU chauvinism and NATO imperialism upstaged mercantile considerations. EU political and NATO military expansion preceded apace, consequences be damned. Having escaped the bounds of original intent and prudence, the EU is now thought to be imperial, an enemy to the safety and sovereignty of EU member states.

Brexit and Donald Trump may be two too late for a European Union paralyzed by arrogance and denial.

Since World War II, Europe has at once become captive to spendthrift social democracies, colonial guilt, globalist phantasies, and a kind of communal imperialism that diminishes real Muslim threats with appeasement and invents Russian thugs to rationalize a bigger EU and a larger NATO.

To blame any of this on Donald Trump, confuses effects with causes. Or as a Cassius put it, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”